Special report

In 1959, Cesare Maestri scaled this forbidding Patagonian peak in what was hailed as 'the greatest climbing feat of all time'. The trouble is, his partner died on the way down and, in a sport where honesty and trust are crucial, no one else could verify his tale. Controversy simmered. Had Maestri reached the top or not? Late last year, one man set out to find the truth in the only way possible - by climbing the same dangerous route

History records 3 February 1959 as the day the music died, the icy early morning when Buddy Holly's Beech Bonanza aircraft crashed a few miles north-west of Mason City, Iowa. But on the same day, 6,500 miles to the south in remote Patagonia, an Italian mountaineer called Cesare Maestri came back as if from the dead.

For six days, Cesarino Fava had waited for Maestri and his partner Toni Egger to return from their attempt to climb Cerro Torre, in Argentina, a mountain so forbidding and wildly steep that it seems more like a work of imagination than geographical fact. But that morning Fava was forced to accept his friends weren't coming back. Somewhere up on the frozen walls above him, they had met their deaths.

Packing up his personal belongings, Fava left the snow cave the team had dug into the glacier below the peak. As he took one last look at Cerro Torre before heading downhill to base camp, he noticed a black lump in the snow beneath the mountain's east face. When he reached it, he realised it was Maestri, more dead than alive, his face and beard encrusted with ice. 'Only three words escape through his teeth,' Fava wrote afterwards. 'Toni, Toni, Toni.' So began the greatest of all mountaineering controversies.

The story Maestri had to tell was harrowing and inspirational. In a sustained burst of effort over several days, he and Egger had achieved the impossible: climbing the impregnable Cerro Torre, swiftly and using equipment that by today's standard was antediluvian. Abandoning their slow siege, they rushed it, climbing fast on thick ice that encased the peak after weeks of bad weather.

The brilliant Egger, Maestri explained, had used this ice as a kind of expressway to fly up to the summit. It was an achievement unprecedented in climbing. But on their second day of descent, as Egger searched for a sheltered ledge where they could spend the night, an avalanche swept the face. When it cleared, Egger was gone. Having lost his sleeping bag and bivouac gear in the avalanche, Maestri shivered through the long night and then descended the final few hundred feet alone.

In Italy, Maestri was hailed as a hero. He received a medal for bravery and signed lucrative book contracts. Even sweeter was the approval of his peers. Frenchman Lionel Terray, a veteran of South American and Himalayan expeditions, told the world that Maestri and Egger had performed 'the greatest climbing feat of all time'. It says something about the difficulties of Cerro Torre, about its atrocious weather and the near-vertical granite walls that take up nearly 4,000 of the peak's 10,262 feet height, that most climbers agreed.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Maestri's success, for someone with no knowledge of mountaineering, is that he had absolutely no proof of what he had done. Egger, Maestri explained, had been carrying their camera and it was lost when he fell. But, like other significant mountaineering achievements, his claim was accepted without the corroboration that photographs would supply. For many climbers and, more crucially, the sport's record-keepers, it is a point of honour.

'Almost all of us,' says Duane Raleigh, publisher of Rock and Ice magazine in the United States, 'have gone out and done things that no one saw. I've done it and I expect to be believed.' Raleigh says that his readers still feel that climbers are inherently honest and should be accepted at their word. The problem for the now 77-year-old Cesare Maestri, who lives in the Dolomite ski resort of Madonna di Campiglio in the north-west of Italy, and for the quixotic and sometimes fractious climbing world is that almost no one who knows anything about Cerro Torre still believes his story.

In the 47 years since his greatest achievement, scepticism about Maestri's claim has slowly turned from a trickle to a flood. The mystery of what really happened on Cerro Torre even inspired Werner Herzog's 'fictional' movie, Scream of Stone, in 1991. But in all that time no one was able to repeat Maestri's route. Once they did, Maestri said, they would find the evidence that he and Egger had been there, just as he claimed. And then, last November, three climbers, two from Maestri's own valley, achieved what no one had managed in more than 40 years: they followed the line of Maestri's climb.

If Cesare Maestri has a nemesis, beyond his own demons, then he is Ermanno Salvaterra. Now 51, Salvaterra's body has the crisp, hard lines of a rock climber 20 years his junior, his forearms abnormally thick, his fingers gnarled and scarred after a lifetime spent hanging off them and twisting them into granite cracks.

We meet one day in March in the busy Dolomite village of Pinzolo, outside his old elementary school. We are a few miles down the valley from Maestri's home in Madonna di Campiglio. Salvaterra is just back from a morning on the slopes above Madonna, where he works in the winter as a ski instructor. (As well as his climbing exploits, Salvaterra holds the Italian speed skiing record at 211.64 km per hour and is well known for his extreme skiing descents.)

There are few men alive with the same depth of knowledge of Cerro Torre as Salvaterra. He has endured nine expeditions to the mountain and reached the summit on five of them. He was among the first to climb the mountain in winter; in 2004 he added a new route on the peak's east face. But it is what Salvaterra did last November that has animated the climbing world.

A decade ago, Ermanno Salvaterra was one of Maestri's greatest defenders. Ten years on, after studying Maestri's claim in forensic detail, he has become the old man's most qualified detractor. Before he left for Cerro Torre last November, Salvaterra told the press: 'If I find one of their pegs, I'll fling it in the world's face, but first and foremost in mine.' He found nothing.

At his chalet on the outskirts of Pinzolo, while we wait for his young climbing partner Alessandro Beltrami, Salvaterra shows me some of his extensive archive of material and evidence gathered from more than 20 years of exploring Cerro Torre. He is in regular contact with Rolo Garibotti, an exceptionally talented young climber who was born in Italy, raised in northern Patagonia and who now lives in the United States.

Garibotti was with Salvaterra and Beltrami on Cerro Torre in November and, fluent in Italian, Spanish and English, he has been invaluable to Salvaterra in the dismantling of the Maestri legend, publishing a withering critique of the Italian's claim in the American Alpine Journal, mountaineering's equivalent of Wisden

Salvaterra puts in my hands the hammer he recovered from Cerro Torre, which belonged to Maestri and was abandoned there by him in 1959. He found it low on the peak's east face, just below a big snowfield. A modern climber takes hold of this hammer, used for pounding pitons, metal spikes that hold ropes, into cracks in the rock, just as a modern soldier would grasp a medieval broadsword. It is crude and redundant, since pitons are used infrequently these days, but weighty and still impressive. 'Had I found something - not necessarily close to the summit, but even just beyond the first snowfield - it would have been enough for me,' he explains. 'But this was not it.'

Even at 77, Maestri remains strikingly handsome. Outspoken and often crude, he has become increasingly bitter about his detractors. In recent months, since Salvaterra and his friends repeated his climb and disputed his claims, Maestri has communicated largely through his lawyer: 'Once again, I claim the right to be respected. And I'm taking this opportunity to warn those who are making defamatory and injurious statements about me and my alpine record, which are offensive to the memory of Toni Egger.'

Maestri was born in Trento in 1929. His mother died when he was seven and he was left in the care of his father, Toni, who once worked as an itinerant actor but had been a civil servant since the end of the First World War, when the Trentino region was ceded to Italy as part of the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When the Germans occupied northern Italy in 1943 after the overthrow of Mussolini, a death warrant was signed against Toni for anti-Austrian activities 25 years earlier and the family went into hiding on the plains around Bologna, near his wife's home town of Ferrara. When local police were instructed to arrest Toni, the family returned to Trento. Cesare joined Communist partisans fighting the Germans.

After the war, Cesare's father helped the Americans carry out bomb-disposal work and then, anxious that his son should follow him into the theatre, Toni sent Cesare to Rome to study the history of art. Cesare became re-engaged in Communist politics but, after two years in Rome, he threw it all in and returned to Trento. It was then that he began to climb.

Maestri did not think of the mountains as a wild, natural environment where he could lose himself. 'I don't climb for a hobby,' he told those who criticised his controversial climb. 'Frankly, I just didn't know how to come to terms with society; I just couldn't see how to put the hardness I had gained during the war to good use. I thought of taking up motor racing, but one day I arrived at Trento and was taken to climb. From that moment on, I decided that climbing was going to be my life and my way of expressing myself.'

The steep limestone cliffs around his home became the ultimate stage on which he could strut and show others his worth. An article about him carried the headline 'Ragno delle Dolomiti', 'Spider of the Dolomites', and the nickname stuck. He was utilitarian in his philosophy and the title of his autobiography, Arrampicare è il mio mestiere, translates as 'Climbing is my job'. He described his routes in the Dolomites by the number of metres climbed or the number of pitons he placed, not the beauty of the line, or how he felt doing it. To keep fit, he said, he made love in the press-up position.

Climbing is - or, at least, was - a sport all about partnerships, but Maestri wasn't prepared to share the credit. He described himself as an anarchist and saw climbing as a form of supreme self-expression. 'The day I feel I want to hand over the lead to another man,' he said, 'will be the day I give up climbing.' Yet his name is inextricably linked with that of Toni Egger, whom Maestri came to idealise as the greatest of all ice climbers.

Egger was born in the south Tyrolean town of Bozen, known as Bolzano since being ceded to Italy in 1919. But under the terms of Die Option, the deal struck between Mussolini and Hitler over those Austrians living in Italy following the German annexation of Austria in March 1938, the Egger family moved to a village just outside Linz. Egger fought for a year in France, at the end of the war, then returned home. There, as Maestri had before him, he began to reinvent himself as a climber.

Only two people knew what really happened on Cerro Torre in January 1959: Maestri and Toni Egger, who never returned from the mountain. Not even support climber Cesarino Fava, who had saved Maestri, knew everything. Fava, who was also from the Trentino region, was one of a new wave of Italian émigrés to Argentina after the war. He suffered terrible frostbite working there as a guide on Aconcagua and lost his toes. Thwarted by his disability, Fava became an advocate for Patagonian climbing, sending the young Maestri photographs of Cerro Torre in 1953.

Fava, however, was not the only Italian émigré attracting the attention of his compatriots to the huge granite walls of Cerro Torre. His great rival, Folco Doro Altan, had been teamed in 1958 with Walter Bonatti and Carlo Mauri on Cerro Torre's west face. Bonatti and Mauri were from the heartland of Italy's climbing establishment. Fava and Maestri were desperate to beat them to the prize.

Maestri and Fava first went to Cerro Torre in early 1958. But when the peak's rocky pinnacle emerged from the clouds, the leader of the expedition took one look at its steep walls and called the trip off without setting foot on the mountain. Maestri knew that Mauri and Bonatti would come back to try again and was determined to ensure he made his ascent first. But Maestri needed a partner and in the summer of 1958 he found one. 'Egger was a good-looking fellow,' says Rolo Garibotti, 'a ladies' man like Maestri. After meeting briefly in the Dolomites, Egger and Maestri immediately hit it off. Here was one of the few climbers in Europe whom Maestri could respect as an equal.'

What happened in the first weeks of 1959 on Cerro Torre can only be understood from what Maestri and Fava have written and said, and from what they left on the mountain. The problem is that each time they told the story, every time Maestri tried to draw their line of ascent on the mountain, the 'facts' changed and the line shifted.

As long as no one attempted to repeat their climb of Cerro Torre, the mountaineering world was prepared to accept Maestri's story. But in 1968 a top British team visited the mountain. After struggling and failing on what seemed to be an easier route, they questioned whether Maestri could have climbed the mountain, especially in six days. Gear was heavy then. No one could move that fast. An inquiry began, marshalled by British climbing publisher Ken Wilson, who studied Maestri's accounts. He discovered that while the early part of the climb was described in plausible detail, the upper section was vague to the point of omission.

Even worse for Maestri, Carlo Mauri, his old rival for Cerro Torre from the Fifties, described the mountain to the Italian press as 'unclimbed', suggesting that Maestri's ascent was fabricated. Stung by what he regarded as a taunt against his honour, Maestri returned to Cerro Torre and the route the British had tried in 1968. In 1971, he took a petrol-driven compressor and drilled hundreds of expansion bolts up it. Even then he didn't quite make it to the summit. Compared to the clean, fast style of his 1959 ascent, this new route was a travesty, equivalent to advanced steeplejacking. Far from settling the issue, Maestri found himself under direct attack for the first time.

Adventure film-maker Leo Dickinson, who was on Cerro Torre soon after Maestri's return in 1971, was shocked by what he found. 'When we interviewed Maestri about it, he was happy to defend his bolt route. He told me in 1972, "I believe in absolute liberty, that we should walk in our own particular circle, that our own circle should not impose upon others". But it's akin to getting a cable car up Mont Blanc and fooling yourself that you have climbed it.'

So far, however, Maestri had only faced rumours and suspicion. But in 1976 three Americans - John Bragg, Jim Donini and Jay Wilson -made the first ascent of Cerro Torre's neighbouring peak, named Torre Egger in Toni's memory. They shared just the first part of Maestri's claimed line, to the Col of Conquest, between the two peaks. The climbers started up their climb believing Maestri's 1959 claim. But when they found Maestri's hammer, later recovered by Salvaterra, and a stash of equipment, they began to wonder.

The Americans discovered that the lower section of Cerro Torre's east face, which Maestri described so thoroughly in his accounts, was strewn with gear. Above the stash they found nothing. Nor did Maestri's description match the climbing they repeated. Looking from below, from the small ledge with the abandoned pitons, it appeared to make sense. It's only when Bragg and his team did the climbing that its logic fell apart.

According to Salvaterra, the climbing his team did between the Col of Conquest and the summit was hard and steep. Maestri claimed he and Egger climbed a sheet of ice that sheathed the summit tower. This, he said, was up to a metre thick. 'For 300m we go up climbing on air,' he wrote.

No matter that similar ice conditions have never been experienced on Cerro Torre by anyone else. Or that Maestri's own description puts the angle at no more than 50 degrees when in reality it is almost vertical. Maestri compared the angle to that of the north face of Presanella near his home in Madonna, a route that Ermanno Salvaterra has skied down. 'I could go down Cerro Torre with skis,' Salvaterra told me, 'but only if they were strapped to my rucksack.'

In the one interview that anyone has managed to get from Maestri since Salvaterra's climb, French journalist Charlie Buffet, fluent in Italian, put to him the defining question: where would the bolts be found? Denouncing Salvaterra and accusing him of ruining his life, Maestri changed his story, denying his earlier claim that he had placed 60 of them. Buffet asked him how, then, had he and Egger protected their ascent.

'We dug a hole in the ice, laid an axe horizontally inside, fixed a little rope to it, then covered it with snow and ice until the hole was as full as a glass.' This contradicted Maestri's earlier account and few believe that such a technique could even work. Buffet asked him about the descent and Maestri said that they had left equipment as they abseiled down the mountain. 'If they don't want to believe me, then we must question the whole of mountaineering,' Maestri said. 'This is my stand, but not for me alone: if we don't believe one climber, we don't believe anyone. Do you understand my point?'

Soon the interview degenerated into abuse, but not before Maestri had offered a tantalising glimpse of his inner turmoil.

'I don't have to explain anything; I don't owe anything to anyone. They can invent what they want - pitons, no pitons, I couldn't care less. What I did was the most important endeavour in the world. I did it single-handedly. But this doesn't mean that I... that I reached the top, do you understand? Do I make myself clear?'

The mass of evidence stacked against Maestri, culminating in the first repeat of his most famous climb, has pushed him to the edge, according to friends. Those who know him well describe him as depressed. Italian journalist Giorgio Spreafico, who is writing a history of Maestri's Cerro Torre climbs, says that at a recent meeting Maestri spoke about Casimiro Ferrari, who many believe should be credited with the first ascent of Cerro Torre for his climb on the west face in 1974. 'Maestri said that he and Ferrari had two things in common,' Beltrami recalls. 'That they had both climbed Cerro Torre and that they had both suffered cancer. He also said that he wished it had been he, Maestri, who died of it, and not Ferrari.'

Maestri has often said that he wished he died on Cerro Torre and talks about the pleasure he would feel if the mountain were smashed to pieces, embracing the destruction of what he still claims as his greatest creation. He has also repeatedly told journalists that if they doubt him, they doubt the whole sport. Mountaineering, Maestri is saying, lives or dies with his reputation.

In Pinzolo, Alessandro Beltrami, Salvaterra's young partner from Cerro Torre, arrives with his girlfriend. Where Salvaterra is restless and edgy, Beltrami is gentle and modest. He is full of doubts about Maestri's climb but had told Salvaterra that he should lay off the old man. In Italy, what happens on the surface is often more important than the reality beneath. Now, however, he hopes Maestri will lay the burden of Cerro Torre to rest.

Salvaterra shows us a letter he sent to Maestri recently, asking him to tell the truth. Maestri had scrawled on the envelope that he didn't want to read its contents and was returning it unread. But it is also quite obvious that the envelope has been opened and then stuck back down again.